OVEREDGE - Maphead - page 147

agentfromtheHarrisburg,Pennsylvania,area—byallaccountsapopularandextraordinar-
ily energetic geocacher but to me a total enigma. She walked away from the game in 2009
and now refuses to discuss the geocaching world she once ruled.
Most prolific megacachers are retirees with limitless free time, but Black was a busy
business owner and mother of three. She hauled her family around on power-caching runs
all over the eastern seaboard, but none of them quite had her boundless stamina for the
game. She soon became aware that her geocaching obsession was becoming a problem.
“ I don't do anything besides geocaching,” she told a newspaper in 2005. “You need to set
up a clinic for Geocachers Anonymous,” her husband, Kevin, concurred. She tried to quit
several times, telling an interviewer in 2006, “ I started to miss my kids. They're sick of
geocaching. It's just too selfish, you know what I mean?”
But each time she thought she was out, like Michael Corleone, she'd get pulled back in.
Her rival Lee van der Bokke had been about fourteen hundred caches behind Black from
the time he started and couldn't gain any ground on her no matter what he did. In 2005, he
heard from a mutual friend that she'd quit caching once and for all, in order to see more
of her family. “Two days later,” van der Bokke marvels, “she hops on a plane and heads to
Germany without her family for six weeks' caching! That got me so upset.” In late 2008,
she finally called it quits after her 25,000th cache and retired her CCCooper-Agency ac-
count for good. But within a week, she was caching again—though not as avidly—under a
different handle. Finally, on the last day of 2009, at a cache near a Lancaster County lake
just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, she left the following log:
Was out enjoying a nice walk with my husband and he was the one to find it.
Very nicely done. Last cache.
And with those two words, “Last cache,” she was finally done.
The saga of CCCooperAgency, as I come to understand it in fragments, from interviews
and message board postings and geocache logs, is a cautionary tale for me. Some people
are born with a genetic predisposition to addictions like alcoholism, but, like Lynn Black,
I seem to have been born to geocache, and to geocache obsessively. My deepest
loves—maps, exploring places, solving puzzles, space-age gadgetry—make me a perfect-
storm candidate for GPS rehab.
After-school specials have led me to believe that “bottoming out” stories from real ad-
dictions often involve back alleys and Dumpsters, and in the end, mine does too. I'm nos-
ing around the Dumpster behind a Discount Tire one afternoon because my GPS receiver
seems convinced that there's a geocache hidden somewhere in the rockery there. I've been
searching forless than a minute when Irealize that a jump-suited “tire specialist” is watch-